How to setup scalable private WordPress hosting for $2.5/month

WordPress is the most popular content management system in this world. In this world, yes, because 30% of the websites are powered by WordPress. Even the blog post you are reading right now is written in WordPress.

WordPress is used by small websites like personal blogs, small company blogs as well as some big names like the Facebook Newsroom or Techcrunch are powered by WordPress.

The credits for the popularity of WordPress goes to its flexibility, scalability and a massive repository of paid and free plugins as well as themes. It is so popular that it has created a whole new market worth millions of dollars.

WordPress is open source which means you can get a code for free and you can do anything with it. You can even create a WordPress theme or plugin and sell it to make a profit. Or you can set up an infrastructure to support multiple WordPress blogs and sell WordPress hosting to your customers.

There are unlimited possibilities of what you can do with WordPress. However, In this article, I will show you how you can set up a scalable private WordPress hosting for $2.5/month.

It looks cheap, but it is going to be a high-performance WordPress hosting because we recommended it to some of our users and they are delighted with the configuration and performance. The WordPress hosting we are going to setup can handle thousands of visitors on daily basis. Here are the features you will get in this configuration.

Better loading time

Isolation

Light-weight Server panel

Improved overall performance

WordPress websites management

Database management

These are the features we will get on $2.5/month hosting. It is exceptional because you don’t always get these features with shared hosting at this value. In this article, We are going to cover following topics in detail.

Practical differences between shared and private hosting

Understanding How our private hosting will work

Setting up our scalable private hosting for $2.5/month

Creating WordPress websites using Auto-installer

BONUS!!!

As we are using a word Private, we must know the difference between private and shared hosting first. If you already know the difference, you can skip this topic and jump to the second one. So, let’s see the difference between shared and private hosting without wasting more time.

Practical differences between shared and private hosting

There are 3 sub-topics we are going to cover in this topic. I decided to divide this topic into multiple sub-topics because it is easier to understand. Let’s start with Privacy and Security.

Privacy and Security

When you sign up for web hosting plan on Godaddy, Bigrock or similar web hosting companies, you are signing up for shared hosting which means that the server on which they will host your websites will also contain sites hosted by their other customers.

For instance, Let’s consider a web hosting company having a server with 12GB of RAM and 12 customers. In that case, they will merely divide a 12GB server between 12 users. Each user will get 1GB of RAM while CPU will be shared entirely in the majority of cases.

The issue with shared hosting is that you might lose authority in the eyes of crawler and mail services. Let’s assume that one of those 12 users is a spammer and he is using the server to send thousands of emails to thousands of people without their permission. In that case, services like Gmail will blacklist the IP address of the server, and then, every mail sent from that server will be marked as Spam including yours because you are sharing same IP address with a spammer.

Sharing a server with a person you don’t know is not a good idea when you can get a private server for less than what you are already paying to your hosting company right now.

In case of private hosting, you get a private server to host your websites. Also, you don’t share IP address with others which increases your privacy and security. You also don’t have to share resources of your server with anyone.

Scalability

In case of scalability, Private hosting wins by a mile. With shared hosting, you get a limited amount of resources even in the best plan offered by a hosting company. In case of private hosting, there is no limit.

Let’s understand this with a practical example. The most expensive virtual private server provided by Digitalocean.com has 192GB RAM while the most expensive WordPress hosting plan on Hostgator.com has 6GB RAM.

Even hosting company will start recommending you private hosting once you start getting traffic that a 6GB RAM can’t handle. Why not start with a private hosting right now?

Speed and Performance

Even in this matter, private hosting is best because the resources available on the server will be used by your websites only. In case of shared hosting, traffic spikes on your neighbor’s website might affect the performance of your site.

Let’s understand this phenomenon by a simple example. Assume that you are sharing a server with a person having a website that gets sudden spikes in traffic. When the site your neighbor owns starts getting sudden traffic, the resources your server has will be used to handle that traffic which means that your website will have fewer resources to handle the traffic your website is getting.

In case of private hosting, all the resources your server has will be used to serve the website to your visitors only. Migration to private hosting will undoubtedly improve speed and overall performance of your website.

Understanding How our private hosting will work

To create a web hosting we want, we first have to understand how it works. It’s effortless to understand, and I am not going to tell you to execute a single command while setting up our private hosting.

First of all, we need a virtual private server. We are going to get our Virtual Private server or VPS from vultr.com because it is the only company that has $2.5 VPS available for sale.

To create a server in Vultr.com, just create an account and link a payment method to your account so that you can pay for the services you use. Once done, you will see a vultr dashboard just like the following image.

Virtual private server provided by Vultr.com is not managed, and we don’t even want managed Server because we are going to manage our server using ServerAvatar.com.

We have to manage our virtual private server using management panels like ServerAvatar.com because you don’t get management panel with un-managed Virtual private servers. The only way to connect with your server prior connecting it with Systems like serveravatar.com is through SSH (Command line interface).

We need ServerAvatar.com or similar server management system to configure our server as well as to manage Web sites and databases on our server.

You can create an account in ServerAvatar for FREE! Just click here, Enter the required information and submit. You will get E-mail verification link in your Inbox to verify your E-mail address. The whole registration process will take less than 2 minutes.

Your ServerAvatar dashboard will look like the following image.

Now, we have a website that can provide us Virtual Private Servers on-demand as well as a Server Management system to manage our server. That’s all we need to set-up our Private WordPress hosting. So, let’s get started with the process! Again, it’s very very easy process.

Setting up our scalable private WordPress hosting

Our configuration consists of two major steps. First one is to create a Virtual Private server and the second one is to connect it with ServerAvatar.com. So, let’s get started with the first step.

Create a Virtual Private Server

We already have our Vultr account ready to create a virtual private server. So, Let’s create a Virtual private server first. To create a VPS in Vultr.com, Click on the +(Round) button given on the right side of the screen just like the following image.

Now, You will see an Instance creation wizard with multiple steps. In the first step, you have to select the location of your Virtual Private Server. However, if you want to create a $2.5/month instance, Select Miami or New York as a location.

In Server Type, Select Ubuntu 16.04 x64.

In Server Size, Select $2.50/mo instance having 1 CPU, 512MB memory, 500GB Bandwidth and 20GB SSD. If you want to select a bigger instance, you can.

In Additional Features, you can select the features you want. Auto backups are really recommended as it will automatically create backups of your server so that you can restore if something goes wrong.

In Startup Script, You can upload a bash script you want to execute when the server is booted up. However, if you don’t know what startup script is, you can just ignore this step.

In SSH Keys, You can upload an SSH key if you want to. We don’t have a use of SSH keys so we are just going to ignore this step too.

In Server Hostname & Label, You can enter anything to identify your server. Entering the primary domain name is recommended.

Once you have entered all the required information, Click on the big Deploy now button given in the bottom-right corner of the screen just like the following image.

It will take two to three minutes to completely create a server. Once it is ready, you will get a Ready status and manage link will appear on the right side of the Status column just like the following image.

Now, Click on the Manage link to navigate to the server information page. On this page, you will find the information that we need to connect our virtual private server with ServerAvatar.

Our server is ready and now we can connect it to our ServerAvatar account.

Connect a Server with ServerAvatar

It is really easy to connect a server with ServerAvatar. Just click on the Add Server button given on the dashboard or Add->Server given on the top navigation bar. You will see a form with three fields just like the following image.

In Server Name field, Enter the name of your server. It can be anything. It is just used to identify your server.

In IP Address field, Enter the IP address of your server. You can find IP address of your server from the Server information page we just accessed before some time.

In Root password field, Enter the root password of your server. You can find root password as Password on Server information page.

Once you have entered all the required information, click on the Add Server button and ServerAvatar will start working on your server. It might take 2-3 minutes to fully configure your server but you will get a notification when your server is ready.

To access the Server Panel, Click on the Servers from the left sidebar and then click on the Server Panel corresponding to the server. The server panel of your server will look like the following image.

Creating WordPress websites using Auto-installer

ServerAvatar already has WordPress Auto-installer so that you don’t have to worry about installing WordPress manually. To create a new WordPress website, Click on the Create Application button given in the Applications card on Server Panel just like the following image.

One the create application page, you will see a simple form with 2 fields and 1 drop-down menu. You just have to enter the name of the application, domain name of the application and the type of the application. In application type, we will select WordPress because we want to set up a WordPress website.

Once you have entered all the required information, Click on the Create application button and your WordPress website will be ready in few seconds!

You can also create multiple WordPress websites on the same server. To create more WordPress Websites, Navigate to Applications page on the Server Panel and click on the Create Application button given on the top-right corner of the box.

You can create as many WordPress websites as you want. As you are still reading this article, We have something for you.

BONUS!!!

It is a secret! And you can only know the secret if you are really serious about the topic we are talking about. Check it out!

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Unlock this exclusive content by using one of the sharing buttons below.

Now we know you are seriously reading the article with all your heart. We have two things for you. They are:

FREE MIGRATION: If you are on shared hosting and want to shift your websites to private hosting, we will help you migrate your websites from shared hosting to private Server without unexpected downtimes.

For free migration, You can shoot us E-mail at support@serveravatar.comand we will respond as soon as possible. Thanks for sharing our content.

Conclusion: So, this is how you can set up scalable Private WordPress hosting for less than $2.5/month. Frankly, It can handle thousands of visitors on a daily basis as well as your websites get all the resources that your server has to serve content to your beloved visitors. The WordPress hosting we just configured is highly scalable and can be scaled to handle millions of visitors on daily basis.

We hope you liked the article. If you have questions regarding this topic, you can comment down your questions in the comment section and we will respond as fast as possible.

Dear Adarsh, you have written this article excellent. Your guide to starting a private blogging/website platform is valuable. Sincerely, we heard the name of Vultr first time by you via Quora. We too like it. However, there is another server cheap private server (VPS) provider, which is cheaper than Vultr too. It’s a Cloudcone. I never used it but their prices start at $2/month via cloudcone[dot]com/offers/

However, their server is limited to one and no SSD drives. Still, it provides much value for money.